Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Incluse exclusa
- Introduction
- 1 Miles Christi: Early Anchoritic Masculinity and the Sacred
- 2 Videte vocacionem vestram: Late-Medieval Male Anchoritism and the Spectral Feminine
- 3 Writing the Flesh: Female Anchoritism and the Master Narrative
- 4 Reading with the Eyes Closed: Revising the Master Narrative
- 5 Mapping the Anchorhold: Anchorites, Borderlands and Liminal Spaces
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Videte vocacionem vestram: Late-Medieval Male Anchoritism and the Spectral Feminine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Incluse exclusa
- Introduction
- 1 Miles Christi: Early Anchoritic Masculinity and the Sacred
- 2 Videte vocacionem vestram: Late-Medieval Male Anchoritism and the Spectral Feminine
- 3 Writing the Flesh: Female Anchoritism and the Master Narrative
- 4 Reading with the Eyes Closed: Revising the Master Narrative
- 5 Mapping the Anchorhold: Anchorites, Borderlands and Liminal Spaces
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Practical faith is the condition of entry that every field tacitly imposes, not only by sanctioning and debarring those who would destroy the game, but by so arranging things, in practice, that the operations of selecting and shaping new entrants … are such as to obtain from them that undisputed, pre-reflexive, naive, native compliance with the fundamental presuppositions of the field which is the very definition of doxa.
MALE ENGLISH ANCHORITISM AND THE BENEDICTINE IDEAL
THE ‘PRACTICAL FAITH’ of medieval male anchoritism and the compliance of its adherents to an ideal were deeply indebted to the ‘fundamental presuppositions’ which made up the Rule of Saint Benedict, presenting the reader with a male anchoritic paradigm which remained close to its coenobitic and desert roots, in spite of its geographical and temporal separation from those origins. As such, this ‘ideal’ anchorite tended to generate far less anxiety for those responsible for his welfare than did the female anchorite, due in part to his already having been subject to tried and tested regulation as a monk or priest (the ‘condition of entry’). It was doubtless also a result of the panopticon-type scrutiny to which the male anchorite was party and to which he would also have become already well accustomed within the monastic setting. Whilst actively gazed upon by his brothers, he was nevertheless himself an active gazer too, a duality of perspective which restored to him the subjectivity which he may otherwise have been in danger of relinquishing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval AnchoritismsGender, Space and the Solitary Life, pp. 43 - 76Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011